Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Divine music is broadcast from dawn to dusk in countless rhymes of nature in streams, in birds and insects, in winds and in many other ways if our ears are properly attuned. Is God to be believed in or tasted? For believers ordinarily it is said that the former is the case. But for some more adventurous souls He is to be tasted here and now. “ Her mokh wuchak deedar. ” But ordinarily believers believe, and also taste something of Him. Artists live by tasting Him. Those who are sensitive to the aesthetic richness of the sounds of Quran recitation and na’ts , or know how to offer nimaz-i-shouq , keep tasting it. Listening to great Qari is a rare feast from heaven. Mystics are entirely consumed in this tasting. Prophets preach only after first hand tasting of God.  Divine music is broadcast from dawn to dusk in countless rhymes of nature in streams, in birds and insects, in winds and in many other ways if our ears are properly attuned. And from dusk to dawn is played  a special music

Hardy’s Jude the Obscure shows how fate make the hero fall through sexual misconduct. Complaints against fate are legion. Not just ordinary people but poets and philosophers have been voicing them. Hardy’s Jude the Obscure shows how fate make the hero fall through sexual misconduct. Cioron, arguably after Schopnhaur the most uncompromising pessimist philosopher, is all rage against the joke that man’s fate seem to be. Kahlil Gibran asks why we aren’t consulted either at birth or at death.  Man has been sentenced (taking this life as a sentence) for sins he doesn’t know, both Kafka and Beckett seek to show in their literary works. Maugham  also portrays man’ bondage to desire and sin and huge costs of resisting it. For modern man God’s ways are simply beyond comprehension. He is hard put to discern any trace of wisdom in His actions.  Camus’ The Plague and Dostoevsky’s Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov put his case with apparently unimpeachable logic.  From Sophocles to Maari to G

For most women living here, Kashmir has always been hell. To live as a daughter is hell, to leave one’s home for the spouse’s home is a bigger hell. To continue to live in alien house (that rarely becomes home) is like serving a life sentence. Most homes are a hell for daughters-in law. Mothers-in law have their own hell to keep burning. But let us today focus on the hell of our daughters who suddenly get deprived of the status as daughters and become only legal subjects, who are no longer humans. One daughter-in-law reaches her home by   6pm   where everyone including the mother-in-law and husband’s brother, are waiting for her to prepare tea and dinner for them. She is unable to take tea before 7.30pm .  Kitchen odour must not spread to irritate anyone in the house and she must be very careful in the kitchen. Another has to buy the milk she boils that curdles for no fault of her own.  Another is caught between two dictators – mother-in-law and husband who make it a point that to no

Dedicated to those who struggle to believe and silently face the trial of doubt and disbelief. “Faith is not a question of the existence or non-existence of God. It is believing that love without reward is valuable.”(Levinas) “Conscience is God. He is even the atheism of the atheist.” (Gandhi) There is a problem of declining faith all over the world that has of late increasingly made itself felt in our State as well. I know many young students struggling to believe but fail to find satisfactory solution to the moral and intellectual questions that popular view of belief in God received from culture seems to raise.  I know anxious parents watching their children slip into disbelief and losing respect for what they have considered holy or sacred. I know of silent atheism of many bright people who chose not to talk about it. There are a large number of thinking people including apparently very religious ones suffering from certain doubt regarding some or the other vital issue connecte